Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Makayla Sault Dies - Brian Clement Got Some Money

On November 18 of last year I wrote about an 11 year old Canadian aboriginal girl named Makayla Sault who had acute lymphoblastic leukemia or ALL. Her parents had ceased medical treatment because Makayla "had a vision of Jesus" and told the doctors that the chemotherapy was killing her, which, to be fair, is a normal child's reaction to a painful medical treatment. Parents are supposed to know better and do what is best for their child. They instead took her to a Florida quack farm called the Hippocratess Health Institute because of some bullshit peddler named Brian Clement.

I am not going to blame the parents. My feeling toward them is frustration and a wish that someone had gotten to them to explain the ins and outs of quackery, to explain how the processes of medicine and science work, and to show some skeptical support. My real vitriolic hate is aimed squarely at Brian Clement and his fucking quack farm.

Leeches like Clement don't suck blood, they suck money from the pockets and savings of desperate people, preying on the sick and injured (and their families) in times of incalculable stress. Hope dwindles, the future looks bleak, and then the smiling, goateed face of Brian Clement shows up with promises of cures and miracles. "Just eat raw food, use homeopathy, and think positively! Leukemia isn't at all difficult to treat - *these* doctors just don't want you to know the cure because they're part of Big Pharma and all they care about is money."

I have an irony device beside me that just melted and formed the letters "Fuck Brian Clement" in liquid on my floor.

It is notable that the family says that Makayla died because of the effects of chemotherapy and that the damage done by the treatment was what caused her stroke. An oncologist from McMaster University, however, said that Makayla had suffered a relapse back in September of 2014 and took the family to court to have Children's Aid Society (CAS) remove Makayla from custody and have the treatment continued because it had an 85-90% chance of curing her. The hospital lost the case and Makayla was taken into the waiting arms of the quacks.

The fraud bullshit salesman, Clement, came to Canada to talk about his stupid money scheme to fleece the ill and said this (my comments in italics):

"Eat a raw plant-based organic diet...This is how we've seen thousands and thousands of people reverse stage four 'catastrophic' cancer...Change your lifestyle first with your attitude. Be positive." If eating fucking raw food and thinking positively cured cancer, real doctors would have figured it out decades ago and would have been using it in hospitals. What a fucking disgusting toolbag.

(P)atients are advised to make sure they don't do things that "contaminate you and pollute you." I guess "contaminating" and "polluting" their minds with bullshit is an exception Clement is ok with.

"Your immune system is what heals you...There is no magic in this process. It's common sense. If you use common sense and what we've learned here at Hippocrates for six decades, you are going to have the same results so many others have." Yeah, if the result you're looking for is to be dead.

What a tremendously ignorant piece of shit. When people say that doctors are arrogant, that hospitals want you to be sick, or that Big Pharma is only about making money, it shows what good marketing the woo peddlers have because those statements can be applied ten times over to the "alternative" medicine world and its practitioners. The arrogance of having no positive (or ANY) clinical trials or even basic understanding of physiology and still claiming that their nonsense can out-perform treatments that help people survive these diseases makes the arrogance of real doctors look like nothing. It's sickening.

I am sad for Makayla's family, but they seem to have comfort in their religion (another big part of the problem). The loss of such a young girl when it was, by all accounts, preventable is heart-breaking. Brian Clement, if he has any sense of humanity, should kill himself out of shame - but of course he won't. There are still families with sick children from whom to get that phat cash, son.

Excuse me while I vomit.

Dr. David Gorski's post from last year on Makayla Sault at Science Based Medicine can be read here.

Raif Badawi - Prisoner of Conscience

Imagine writing something.

Imagine that what you wrote was a form of criticism against a system you thought unfair and wrong. You criticized the leaders of this system.

Then the leaders get wind of what you have written, arrest you, charge you with apostasy, and sentence you to 10 years in prison, a fine, and 1000 lashes. The lashes are to be given in doses of 50, once a week for 20 weeks.

Think about that for a minute. One thousand lashes. Now think about Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger who had just this situation fall upon him and who, today, was due to have the second 50 lashes of his 1000 but it had to be postponed due to health reasons. The "health reasons" are that the first 50 from last Friday had not healed enough for him to withstand more. To refer to this punishment as "barbaric" is an understatement. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a member of the Jordanian royal family said of the sentence:

“Flogging is, in my view, at the very least, a form of cruel and inhuman punishment...Such punishment is prohibited under international human rights law, in particular the convention against torture, which Saudi Arabia has ratified. I appeal to the king of Saudi Arabia to exercise his power to halt the public flogging by pardoning Mr Badawi, and to urgently review this type of extraordinarily harsh penalty.”

Not only was Mr. Badawi sentenced to a ridiculously harsh series of punishments, but his lawyer (and brother-in-law) Waleed Abu Al-Khair, was found guilty on charges that included offending the judiciary and founding an unlicensed organisation and his original sentence of 10 years in prison was increased to 15 years.

Imagine living in a place, under such a weak system, that "offending the judiciary" was considered a crime worth 15 years of punishment. The rulers of Saudi Arabia should be ashamed of harkening back to an age of darkness for horrific "solutions" to non-problems.

Canada, where Badawi's wife and children live presently, is concerned about the floggings and has, "made representations to Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador in Ottawa, and Canada’s Ambassador in Riyadh has met with the Chair of the Human Rights Commission and has sought a meeting with the Government of Saudi Arabia". This translates to very little in actual help for Mr. Badawi. Having an "ongoing, respectful dialogue" with Saudi Arabia can include telling them that what they are engaging in is inhuman and cruel, that they should cease torturing prisoners with (to say it as mildly as possible) questionable criminal credentials, and that there could be policy implications in the future if this behavior continues.

But you will, of course, excuse me if I don't hold my breath while I wait.

Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International, spoke about Badawi's case and what should happen there:

“David Cameron and his ministers should have the courage of their convictions and say – loud and clear – that Raif Badawi’s case is an absolute disgrace, that this weekly flogging should be halted and he should be freed from jail...At the very least the Foreign Office should be calling in the Saudi ambassador and telling him this in person if they haven’t already done so.”

I guess having the oil makes the political puffy chests fade into the back of the room until the dust settles and the next shiny news item grabs the attention of the population.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Not Very Popely..."Poply"? No, "Popely".

Media darling and sometime delighter of the non-religious for his seemingly liberal announcements, Pope Francis recently said something much more in line to what we think of when religious faith is concerned.

"One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun of faith...There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity...in freedom of expression there are limits...If my good friend (Vatican aide Dr. Alberto) Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, then a punch awaits him,"

He followed that gem up with another that seemingly contradicts itself:

“One cannot react violently, but if (someone) says something bad about my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s to be expected,...There are a lot of people who speak badly about other religions. They make fun of them. What happens is what happens with my friend (who insults my mother). There is a limit.”

So are people supposed to react violently or not? Does Frank consider punching a person for talking about his mother a violent reaction? So confusing. And what about that whole Matthew 5:39, 5:44 thing? Out the window?

Thankfully, Frank also said, “no one can kill in the name of God. This is an aberration.” While I am happy that this is his opinion, it is sort of unsupportable in the light of his own source material. I mean, saying that no one should kill in the name of god is just crazy when you look at the cruelty and violence in the bible. I know he's the go-to guy for Catholics with respect to this stuff, but he might need a refresher course or something.

Additionally, I wonder if implying that Islam is a "deviant form of religion" counts as "making fun" of it? In a National Post article from January 13, 2015, Frank said about the Charlie Hebdo attack:

“Religious fundamentalism, even before it eliminates human beings by perpetrating horrendous killings, eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext...Losing their freedom, people become enslaved, whether to the latest fads, or to power, money, or even deviant forms of religion,”

Hm, that really sounds sort of insulting to Islam. He might want to prepare because, by his own logic, he just might have a "punch" coming.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

When, on January 7 of this year, Islamic extremist cowards entered the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's office and opened fire, ultimately killing 12 people, the world was once again rocked by the "religion of peace" flexing its atrophied muscle. Nothing highlights how lame a belief system's arguments are than the resorting to violence of its acolytes. We also see this in the recent story of Pastor Eric Dammann who punched a "bright kid...which made him dangerous" in the chest as hard as he could because Ben, the kid, wasn't taking the Lord serious (sic). At least it was a punch and not a gun, I guess.

I was unaware of the existence of Charlie Hebdo until the recent attack and murder. I would venture to say that many of the users of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag on Twitter were also in the same boat, but because of the moronic and predictably ultra-violent reaction of the extremists, they are experiencing the Streisand Effect to its fullest. Way to go, dumbasses.

This was not the first attack on the magazine's offices. In 2011 the building was firebombed by...who do you think? If you said offended Jews, I'm sorry but you're wrong. It was the Muslim dickheads again, but it resulted in one of the most famous covers for Charlie Hebdo: the kissing one.

Love is stronger than hate, indeed.

There are a ton of cartoons that you can see here if you want to check them out. A lot of them are great, like this one:

Or the most recent cover:

It's important to republish these wherever we can, and not just because it annoys Muslims. No, offending individual Muslims is not the goal; the goal is to further free speech and free expression. As Christopher Hitchens once said, "If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'Well I'm still waiting to hear what your point is'." As has been said a million times before but bears repeating, obviously, again - You do not have the right to NOT be offended.

There are some who have criticized those who have republished the critical-of-Islam cartoons saying that we should be publishing all of the offensive cartoons so as to not isolate Muslims and contribute to "islamophobia". I would reply to that by saying that if Christian extremists went into those offices and shot up the place, killing cartoonists, I'd be republishing the anti-Christian drawings. If there were a couple of Hindu shitheads who took up the fight for some group and blasted 12 writers/cartoonists to their deaths, I'd be publishing anti-Hindu drawings. I do agree with them that all religious texts are nonsense and should be treated with contempt. Here's what CB writers/illustrators did on that front:

Funny how no one freaked out or shot anyone over this image, huh? Weird....

The fact that it was Muslim extremists who committed this horrible crime makes it inevitable that the republication of any cartoons will be of the anti-Islam variety (except, obviously, for the anti-Jewish one up there for the photoshopping bullshit). I may not agree with the writers/illustrators of Charlie Hebdo, but they are correct in that free speech is a right that must be protected and that, "The pen is always above barbarism." Je suis Charlie.

Things I Doubt: Ray Comfort & Kirk Cameron's ability to put together a decent argument...or a decent sandwich, for that matter; Oprah Winfrey's judgment about anything; Jenny McCarthy's anatomical conformity, by which I mean, I think she has neither a brain nor a heart; Jim Carrey's status as a Canadian - am I allowed to unilaterally decline that?; believers in acupuncture and their ability to accept that it is a fantasy; and the justness of a world where I am not rich for my truly amazing humor but Reality TV "stars" continue to rake in the cash.